The Data Mix Podcast
Brian Booden and George Beaton are very excited to introduce The Data Mix - a new show focusing on some of the leading individuals in the Data and Analytics space! Our aim is to bring you our guests in a relaxed and conversational format, where you can ask questions and we can all learn more about some of the topical items in today's Business Intelligence and Data driven world.
The Data Mix Podcast
TDM S3 Ep10 - Qlik Connect 2025 with Mike Capone - Navigating the Agentic Revolution
Qlik CEO Mike Capone shares insights from Qlik Connect in Orlando, highlighting their vision of AI that differs from competitors. He emphasizes that successful AI implementation requires high-quality data integration, governance, and analytics working together seamlessly.
• Qlik's new agentic framework provides end-to-end capabilities across their entire platform
• The Qlik Open Lakehouse leverages Apache Iceberg technology to deliver AI at a better cost point
• Trust Scoring ensures data is consistent and comprehensive enough for AI models
• Transparent pricing ensures customers only pay for what they use with complete clarity
• Qlik maintains a strong commitment to community and social responsibility through Qlik Cares
• The company actively solicits feedback from multiple channels including advisory boards, partners, and customers
• Capone stresses that AI is not optional - companies must lean in and push forward despite uncertainty
• Qlik's approach combines structured and unstructured data to enable smarter decision-making
The keynote and sessions from Qlik Connect will be available for replay soon. Visit the Qlik website to access these recordings and learn more about their latest innovations.
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Your regular fix of the best guests from the world of data and analytics. This is the data mix with Brian Booden and George Peter. Hey everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of the data mix, and we are here in Orlando, florida, at Qlik Connect with Qlik CEO Mike Capone. I feel like I should say hello, even though I've seen you several times already today.
Mike Capone:Let's do it for the audience.
Brian Booden:Let's do it and the floor. Mike, let's start with the floor.
Mike Capone:How are you?
Brian Booden:feeling about this whole vibe? It feels so nice and tight and compact and everyone's getting to know each other well. So how are you? You feeling about all that?
Mike Capone:Yeah, I feel great. Look, you called it Like we got the exact right-side space. The energy is great. You can feel it Like I feel it standing here. You know the energy. I walked the floor earlier, said hello to all the exhibitors and everything and they're thrilled, they're thrilled, it's like coming off really well they're, and our keynote this morning went well, so it's feeding into the excitement here, so all great.
Brian Booden:Well, we'll get on to the keynote in a second, but I think that warm feeling definitely is present. I feel that and not just the physical aspect right, there's a lot of energy in the room and it's always great to see. It's one of the best things about being at Connect. But moving on to the keynote, wow, what a reception for that this morning. It was quite something to be a part of that, and when the ripples of applause come out, it never gets old. So, like for those of us who maybe didn't see the live like what went on this morning, what were some of the major announcements that happened here at connect?
Mike Capone:yeah, well, the good news is we did record it so it'll eventually be available for replay. So I do encourage people who are interested to go to go watch it. Um, but look, I mean there's a couple of One is just us explaining how we see the world right, and the way we see the world is maybe different than others see the world. Everyone's talking about agents like, yay, agents right. But the reality is, agents don't work unless you have really good data, really good analytics underpinning them.
Mike Capone:And so just resetting everybody to say, look, yeah we understand, but you know, like you got to get the data right and then just jumping into our new product now, which we're really excited about, one was our agentic framework, which is different than others, like you know, like it's great. Some application providers are talking about, you know, making restaurant reservations. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about, like end to end agentic capabilities across our entire platform. That platform, data integration, data governance, data quality and analytics. And the second was Quick Open Lakehouse, so the ability to actually harness iceberg tech capabilities and really deliver AI at a better cost point.
Brian Booden:Yeah, yeah, and both of those things are really important. I think it's really important to reference that word agentic again. It's a bit like we talked about AI in depth with the AI Council here last year. Agentic is the word of the year this year but, like you said, it means something different for Qlik and I think a lot of people were hoping, coming into the conference, that we would hear about that magical join between structured and unstructured and true to form.
Brian Booden:And I guess that's more what a Genentech means from Qlik's perspective. Right, it's really tying those things together to make them a seamless experience. So just talk a little bit about that for me, about how that process has been for you and how it's gone.
Mike Capone:It's always been the vision right, so thank you for bringing it up, because it is a big part of our story. And again it starts with agents don't work unless you've got good data. And where are you going to get good data? And we've had quick answers in the market the unstructured data product for quite some time now, but now we've announced the ability to leverage structured and unstructured data together and we demoed some really good examples of that, like, for example, taking structured data your order management system, taking unstructured from your social feeds, et cetera. Putting that together to make smarter decisions and trigger agents. That's really, really important, and you can do that now across the entire platform. So we think we've got something incredibly unique in the market, and what you're seeing and hearing from the people that you're talking to, ryan, is just that excitement.
Brian Booden:And I think that word seamless really strikes me because before, when you've acquired and you've integrated and you've white labeled, you've done that like super efficiently and you've been very good with like promising and delivering. And it feels again with that click answers we've got a massive head start with having a lot of that platform from a physical perspective in place. So I was really excited to see some of the behind the scenes stuff yesterday in terms of dropping an app into that Answers framework and all of a sudden being able to see that structured and unstructured base together. I think it's something that's really exciting. And I think the last thing I'll just mention on that is that it was super cool that you're utilizing the existing Answers framework, so it's not like learning a new thing, it's just a native progression of what's going on. So you must work a lot on that stuff right and making sure it's a seamless experience rather than just new functionality for the market and for the sake of it and for the analysts.
Mike Capone:No completely and look, it's actually it's a religion for us, right? We don't buy a capability or a company unless we know how we're going to integrate it and make it seamless in our platform. It's really, really important to us to be able to do that and it's funny. I was just with an analyst from right before here and they were complimenting us and said well, we've never seen a company so fervent about making sure that the acquisitions become seamless and part of your platform and then sticking to it. Everybody says they're going to do it, but then things get hard and they give up and they stop and it ends up being this thing over here and we don't, and so you're. You know, kindy was a great example of us being able to do that up. Solver, which we acquired in january, is going to be another example of us really doing that, and that's the reason we don't launch the product until ready.
Brian Booden:So you know we'll say like it's not till july, but that's because we're going to finish making it native to our platform I think that having that native experience is a massive thing, and I think, again, you do a terrific job of telling us about the logo that you've acquired and then giving us something that we can see that just feels like Qlik, and I think that's the big thing, right, it feels like Qlik, I mean, and in terms of that other announcement that you talked about, like Upsolver Iceberg these might be words that feel slightly alien to some of the analytics market because it's a bit.
Brian Booden:The architecture is deeper and what it does is faster, but some of the figures that were quoted on there in terms of, like you know, the performance impact and that type of thing, tell us a little bit about that, because that middle layer is incredibly important to what Qlik sees. It's incredibly the future right it's incredibly important.
Mike Capone:And, look, one of the things that's happening right now, as you all know, is AI is getting expensive, right? I think companies are. Companies are starting to see the 12 months worth of bills trying to build out their AI infrastructure and they're saying, wow, this is unsustainable, yeah, and so we have to find the right technology for the right, the right use cases, and so you know Iceberg, you know Apache, iceberg, and then you know that that kind of open source format is a great way to leverage a lower cost of basically storage to be able to actually store data and have it accessible for AI at increasing high volume. So we used to talk about being our data integration platform, doing 17 million rows a second, and we thought that was great. Now we can do hundreds of millions of rows a second. We can stream data off of mobile devices. We can do things.
Mike Capone:Where are you gonna to store that? Well, you can't store it in a database. It's crazy, right? So a great way to do that is Iceberg, and more and more, we're also seeing this fight for independence. So sometimes departments now want to build their own data pipelines. They don't want to wait for IT to go do it, and so the ability to actually like with ClickTile and Cloud, to be able to set up an AI data pipeline, sort it in like an iceberg like format and then use ClickTile on the top of it. Like enables them really really quickly, exactly.
Brian Booden:And I think Like hearing the keynote. I think a lot of people are very keen to adapt their schedules now to understand a bit more about how all that flow works, with the whole agentic side and upsolver, but I think the buzz in the room was terrific this morning, so congrats on that. That was really great. In terms of the way that we incorporate that into the packaging, mike, I think that's the question that's on other people's lips as well.
Brian Booden:We've now heard the announcements and we've obviously just been through a bit of a process with capacity and then adding other things into the packaging. So how do you see that from a kind of holistic view then, how that's all going to like hang together?
Mike Capone:Yeah, like we want transparency, right. So we want customers to really understand what they're paying for and never pay for something they're not using, right? And that's really what capacity pricing is about is getting customers to a place where you pay for what you use and if you need more, then you can go get more, but you can also choose to control it in a way, and we give you all the tools to control it. So we are super transparent about how we're going to price and package things, and the nice thing is, as you know, our products work together really, really well, but we're completely open, right? So if you, if you choose to use our data platform but not our analytics platform, totally fine. The opposite is totally fine as well, and our pricing reflects that.
Brian Booden:Yeah, and I think it's required in the market nowadays as more component parts are added, People need to be able to buy that package sort of. That package, sort of formula I think is coming back to the market an awful lot now to buy that package sort of formula, I think is coming back to the market an awful lot now. First it was subscription, now it's packaging. People don't want to have to go out and understand what all these disparate parts are. They just want to be able to click and go. If you'll pardon the pun, but I think the combination of the packaging and the add-ons are quite strategic. Now I think we see less of them, but they provide a lot of value when you put them right.
Brian Booden:So, again, what's the process been like for that in terms of working that out, what it was in packaging?
Mike Capone:Yeah, well, we talk to our customers, right? So we say how would you buy? We have an executive advisory board, they're here, they're actually meeting right now. And when we roll out one of these big initiatives, or when we're even trying to our customers and say, look, you know, do you want to bundle it, do you think it'd be better to buy individually? And if we bundle it, like, what would it look like and how much you're willing to pay? And then that informs what we, what we do, like look, talent Cloud is a great example where, like, for a while, we sold data integration and data governance separately. But customers started to say, look, it's one thing to us, right, like, I don't want to actually buy a data integration tool, like you know, um, you know, which was a formerly a tunerty, right, uh, but now split the integration and and get a governance.
Brian Booden:like, just give me one bundle yeah, that's what we do yeah and the feedback loop, for that is super important as well. You mentioned the customers, but again, I know obviously from first hand you have a very, very strong partner community that way. I mean we'll talk about those groups in a little bit but yeah, like the partner community has a real influence on what you do, right? And I know of several occasions where feedback has been given and feedback has been acted on, shall we say, and I sat down with Drew last night and we just sat and chatted and the thing that I really liked about it is the open and inclusive culture that Click has, that I can do this with you and you know, brian is not here today unfortunately, but you know, but I think the Qlik leadership are really open, so that's the thing that you're still keeping top of mind, right, all the time.
Mike Capone:Yeah, we have multiple levels of feedback. You sit in on some of the ambassador meeting. Luminaries is another great one. You know we have all these, like all these enthusiastic customers and partners, but also very vocal, we choose them that way intentionally.
Mike Capone:We want the ones that are going to speak up. We don't want the ones that say, oh, we love Click, yeah, I love Click, but here's what I need. You saw it today, by the way, time series Right back. How long have you guys been telling us about that? Here it is. We do listen to customers. It's not always fun, but it works, and I think today you're seeing a lot of the results of that.
Brian Booden:I think that like the levels of that with the advisory board as well, all feed it into each other and I think it's it'd be remiss not to mention again the external input as well, like we talk about the ai council, which is a big announcement last year and that has carried on at pace. So tell us a little bit about how all that has continued to move and conjunct, because there's a lot of moving parts here, right moving parts, yeah, yeah.
Mike Capone:So I mean you talk about our executive advisory board, luminaries, partner ambassadors, and then we do have an AI Council. Nice thing about that is it's completely non-business focus, right. So, though, that group of people that come from academia, they come from government, then they're you know, they're a little bit of our conscience I talk about this all the time that there is a moral obligation that comes with building.
Mike Capone:AI and doing it responsibly and it's not just a capitalist exercise and early on we recognized that we wanted to be best in class at that component of it. But down in Sweden we really believe in doing the right thing for society and so we formed this AI council a couple of years ago and it's become part of our heart like really deep embedded in Click.
Brian Booden:They're all here now.
Mike Capone:And what they do is they tell us, like, here's how you should be thinking about AI, here's how government regulation is going to unfold, here's how society is thinking about it. And then you know, here's how you think about building your products to make sure that you account for this. So they've been great. We're going to continue doing it and you know, if people are really interested, you know we do all kinds of webcasts and things like that with them, so we have to publicize that as well.
Brian Booden:I think it's a stamp of authority on the market as well. The position, the way that you are having that external body is like super important to be able to show to your customers like we're taking this whole thing seriously. That's right. You talk agentic, you talk AI again, lots of words to a lot of people, but having that sort of external input is really, really important.
Mike Capone:So we don't, we don't know it all, like we're not that arrogant that we know everything.
Brian Booden:No, I get that, and I think one of the other big things from last year again was obviously we'd moved on a little bit from the talent acquisition, and there's a word that came up again today that piqued my interest again, and that was trust. So again, this was a big topic on stage today trust scoring and having that sort of dynamic metadata layer and pushing it much further down the stack so that trust scoring becomes an intrinsic part of the way that you work. It's not an optional tick box exercise anymore. So what have you seen in the market that's prompted you to really deep dive on that side of things?
Mike Capone:Well, everybody's jumping in the deep end of the pool, so Gentic is the latest, and then everybody just starts building stuff, and here we go again, and the thing is, agents aren't going to be any good unless your data is good, unless you can trust your data. And so everything we talked about is, yeah, ai is going to be great, but make sure what you feed it is great, right, and so our trust score is a way for us to interrogate data and tell you, yeah, like this data is consistent enough, it's comprehensive enough to be able to use in your AI models. And then the agentic framework, the reason our agentic framework is important. A lot of application providers are talking about agentic right, but okay, that's your static data in your CRM system or your IT service system. What we're talking about is all these data pipelines that you build, having agents sit on top of them, monitoring the quality and consistency of that data. Data is going to data. Data's gonna drip, something's gonna happen.
Mike Capone:You wanna intercept and intervene when there's a change in your data stream that's kicking off all these agents or doing all this kind of automation, and understand that real?
Brian Booden:time.
Mike Capone:That's why the agents have to work across the entire platform. Just having an agent on your CRM system. It's not that compelling, sorry.
Brian Booden:Yeah, I think another thing that I took out this morning was the conditional rules, part of that as well and the agents being able to sort of assess those rules, pass the trust score, then pass it up the chain, and I think this is something that is pretty revolutionary when you think about the amount of people that are usually in that role of satisfying that data, hitting the quality level, promoting it, authorizing it To be able to rule set. That, I think, is a. Is that something that's been like on your mind as a company for?
Brian Booden:a while since, and I'm guessing since before the talent acquisition that was one of the main baselines for going there right.
Mike Capone:Honestly, like when I joined Qlik in 2018, you probably remember well this was the vision we set out to do. You don't do 14 acquisitions in seven years unless you have a vision for what you want to be, and it really was like building this end to end trusted data platform, where you had data integration governance, quality transformation, AI, all in the same platform. So that's what we built. Yeah, it's taken us some time and not everything was available when we wanted it to be available, so we had to kind of build, but we knew this moment was coming.
Mike Capone:Yes so why not get out in front of it? And we think what we've ended up with is something unique. I mean, look at some of the newer stuff we've done around structured and unstructured data, as well as what we're now doing with Iceberg. I think we're ahead.
Brian Booden:Yeah.
Mike Capone:Yeah.
Brian Booden:And again, you said end-to-end there and I find that fascinating, just because Trust Score started pretty deep. So actually, to travel up the stack, I think some people are asking questions about like traveling up the stack, so that when you get to your analytics experience, is that gonna travel up the stack? So there's the open question for you Do you see that idea of Trust Score moving all the way through, first of all to analytics visualization, maybe out the other end, automation and agentic as well to? Just be able to push everything, trust everything.
Mike Capone:That you're using. There's no reason why we can't uh, absolutely take that across the platform. We started with. The demand was around ai and data quality, data pipelines, but certainly going up to the stack analytics it's going to be important.
Brian Booden:I'm sure that's somewhere in the roadmap yeah, I mean that's pretty cool and like having a sneak peek at the whole agentic thing that's happening at the front end of that is really exciting as well. So like there's obviously lots of announcements, lots of technical excitement as well. But switching gears, just to finish off here, I wanted I always like to talk to you about community, right and I always like to talk to you about the people, um, both inside and outside of quick.
Brian Booden:So you obviously have some incredible teams that have been pushing all of these things internally. Yeah, but again a word for like all the oh well, too many groups to mention like the mvps, the partner ambassadors, the social ambassadors, any other that you can think of it's. It's been a crazy ride in terms of the amount of people that are just so locked in to click in terms of, like, that's their thing well, yeah, and what?
Mike Capone:what amazes me is that you know people like you, like you, like you move around, but you stay loyal to. Click right, there's so many people here that, oh, he was Clicking. My last company was Click. I brought Click to my new company and you know, unlike other companies, it's like, all right, you're a company ABC and you go to the Tableau user conference because they use Tableau.
Mike Capone:Then you're a committee xyz. You go to the power bi. You know the microsoft, like it's not that way, like here, it's like, no, I'm click. Like I define myself as a bi ai, that person by using click, so that that to me is super important. Um, and then look the other people I thank, obviously are my, our employees, right? Um, you know my team. Most of them have been with me since the beginning and there's an amazing team underneath those people. Yeah, um, and they've done all this right. I, I had very little to do with it. I give them a little bit of a direction and then drop to the races and so I, I, it is great.
Mike Capone:You know we're small but mighty you know yeah yeah, we have yeah, we have 3 000 people in the company.
Brian Booden:We work really hard, but this is the reward we get to see all this I think there's an immense sense of pride there, but also people are very, very humble. When I speak to someone internally in Qlik, they always know exactly what their piece in the puzzle is yeah and I think that's a really nice thing to be a part of as well.
Brian Booden:I mean, obviously, being part of the partner ambassador ecosystem is an incredible thing to come back that year to year. But the other thing I wanted to mention this year, something I particularly noticed if I you can't see on the board here, but some of the media partners that here we've got, like data voyagers, drinks and data only on tech field day, like the traversal across these groups, everyone is really knows each other and really everyone and sometimes you just get people just coming in right and being.
Brian Booden:Alice, but it feels different. Yeah right, how do you think that's matured over the years, because to me it feels different, having become part of that group more recently than some of these guys.
Mike Capone:It's part of the connected fabric, right? It's funny Click is a way of bringing disparate people. It's just like we bring disparate data together and make sense of it. We draw interest from disparate constituencies, disparate groups and what you see is you know you've got long-time people solving big corporate, hairy problems. But look at, like looking over there, like the impact. We've got our social responsibility unit and stuff with the UN on climate change and human trafficking.
Mike Capone:And like it's just a beautiful cross-section of interest from different groups that comes together. And you know, here we are in the media zone and you can see the diversity here. It's great, it's one. I mean I'm just very lucky, I'm just very lucky to be CEO of this company and have this kind of community.
Brian Booden:Yeah, I mean, I totally do feel that. And you say the word community. There must have been lots of things that happened over the last year that have made you super proud in terms of the wider community, but also initiatives like Click Cares have come around as well, and I'm yet to speak to Julie, but I'm hoping to grab some time with her.
Brian Booden:You must, be like again, immensely proud of the way that these programs don't just stand still but they evolve. That's right, Right and again, that must be a conscious decision and internal push to make sure that those things get the time and effort that they deserve.
Mike Capone:Right, yeah, well for sure, look, I mean. One thing I'll say is that long predated me. The company was founded in Sweden and there's always, always, always been this desire to make sure that we're not only doing good as a company but doing good for the world and that's stuck with us from those early days and even here. You see, we got all the sustainability and everything. We raised money for charity and, look, we're not a big giant company. We don't write big giant checks, but every single person in Click gives time. They give time to charities. We give them time off to go do that. We give our software in kind to solve really hard problems for not-for-profits Could be water shortages in Africa, could be human trafficking, as I talked about, and a lot of times when I talk to people they say that's why I love working at Click, because Click cares is what we say Click cares.
Brian Booden:Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a great place, and I think the last thing I just want to talk to you about here is so much information and data in this conference right, but if you had a couple of, two or three core messages to take away from this year.
Mike Capone:Not necessarily like the physicals of the keynote, but what are your themes that you're thinking about this year in terms of what we're presenting to people here? Yeah, look, I think it's pretty simple. A year ago, all this hype around AI. I think the good news is everybody's woken up to the fact that this is not you know this isn't just plugging a model and you're done right.
Mike Capone:So the good news is, I think, that cycle's kind of passed and now everybody's understanding that there's work to be done here. And then the second thing is lean in. Like you know, the good news is people are here because they get it if you don't come to a Qlik conference and not understand the importance of data analytics and AI in the world. But now we gotta leave, like you gotta leave. You gotta push your company forward. Ai is not optional. It's not. It's just not. The AI is incessant. With all the uncertainty in the world, it's even more in necessity. So go get it.
Brian Booden:Yeah, I think, like Qlik, has shown the way forward in terms of embedding that AI within their internal processes in the back end and also exposing that to users at the right level as well. So I think it's been a big, big period for Qlik over the last year. Thank you Well. Look, look, mike, I know that you're like Russian and you're going from place to place so I'm gonna give you a few minutes back to be able to recover from that.
Mike Capone:It's always great to have you.
Brian Booden:I really, really appreciate it and thanks everyone for watching. This was a live episode of the Data Mix from Qlik Connect in Orlando, florida, and we will see you next time. Cheers, thank you.
